The Price of a Life
by Dalamanza
Summary: The captain's hand; Uppham's conscience; Wade's regrets; Copaze's niece - Maybe, just maybe, Private Ryan was worth saving after all.


Mellish hated Private Ryan; he really did. He'd never even met the man and he hated him. How many people could he say that of?

It was the pure illogicality of the situation that really rubbed him up the wrong way. In what possible way could command justify the decision that one life - of an unremarkable, regular Joe that they'd never met - was worth the loss of, potentially, eight others? Not to mention the waste of precious time and munitions. So his mother had lost three sons. There were thousands of grieving mothers, at that very moment, across Britain alone. Millions, even. And fathers, and daughters, and wives, and friends. How could one woman's happiness be more important than the countless others?

Mellish hated Ryan.

Even so, when he finally looked upon the green-coated, U.S. drawling figure of James Francis Ryan, from Iowa, he found it hard to summon the hate with as much force as he would previously have liked. The image was not how he had imagined it in his head; Ryan was no smirking, over-cocky narcissist, certain that his life was worth more than anyone else's and that this mission served to prove it. It was worse that that. Private Ryan was just a boy.

A boy, barely order than Wade had been. He wore the same the same uniform as the rest of them; he had lived through the same war that they had; he fought for the same country that they did. A regular Joe. Like any of them.

He stood impassively by as the captain informed the private of the loss his family had sustained, and he could have sworn he felt a twinge of pity for the younger man stir in his gut. Unlike the other James Ryan he did not begin bawling. The emotion in his eyes and in his posture was much more controlled, and a thousand times more painful. When he spoke, the hitch in his voice betrayed his agony, and when he walked across to them his shoulders hunched as though the weight of the world had just been placed upon them.

And how could Mellish hate him when he stood in front of them spouting out about new found brothers, and his duty to his comrades? The self-same words that he had scoffed at when thrown at him by Uppham a lifetime ago. He could not scoff now.

Instead, he thought of Wade convulsing on the floor. He thought of Capazo's letter to his fathe,r drenched in rain, blood and tears. He thought of the duty he felt to his fellow soldiers. With home so far away, and his loved ones feeling more and more like a distant memory every day, they were really all he had left to fight for besides his own survival. Because every time a man fell and Mellish found himself still standing, his life was chosen to be of more value than the others. It may not have been by the General - it may not even have been by some divine influence - but, random chance or not, with every bullet that missed by an inch, with every grenade that blew a few feet to the left, every gunner who stopped to reload just as he came over the top, he became a little bit more like Private Ryan. If a boy with a free ticket back home could stand his ground and preach about his duty to others then perhaps that Joe wasn't so regular after all.

And suddenly it hit Mellish, like a grenade out of nowhere, and the smoke cleared and he could see again for what felt like the first time since the war began, and the ringing in his deafened ears stopped and he could hear better than ever before, because it all made sense. If just one man came out of this godforsaken war better than he went in, then maybe it could all have been just that little bit less pointless. If just one man could end his gruelling, heart-breaking, feverish, confusing, _hopeful_ journey with the realisation that it was possible for him to place others' lives above his own then perhaps that man's life was more important than previously judged. And perhaps, it was just possible that in helping Jim Ryan the brigade could regain a small part of their own torn and tattered souls.

The captain's hand; Uppham's conscience; Wade's regrets; Copaze's niece -

Maybe - just maybe - Private Ryan was worth saving after all.


End file.
